The fire

 

I keep pressing my favorite flowers

between the pages of my books

inside a burning house.

As though tenderness could survive

by being hidden.

As though love, if flattened thin enough,

might escape the fire.

But smoke has a way

of entering everything.

Sooner or later,

the flames learn every room by name.

And I feel them now

breathing against my spine,

patient as grief,

familiar as my own pulse.

A warning

that has repeated itself so many times

it no longer sounds like danger,

only home.

Still, I place the flowers carefully

between paper and dust,

like small prayers

I already know will go unanswered.

I tell myself I am preserving them.

But preserved things are not living things.

Dried flowers are corpses

that still remember being beautiful.

And every page I close over them

feels less like saving

and more like burial.

What I wanted

was never this

never these quiet little funerals

pressed flat between chapters.

I wanted a vase on a kitchen table.

Morning light through open windows.

Water changed every few days

by hands that intended for me to stay.

I wanted softness

that did not have to be earned

through suffering.

I wanted a home

that did not confuse destruction

for intimacy.

But the house is always burning.

And I have spent so long inside it

I started calling the flames warmth.

Started mistaking survival

for devotion.

Started believing

that if I loved the fire gently enough,

it might spare me.

Meanwhile the smoke

settled into my lungs so deeply

even my breathing began to sound like mourning.

One day,

my flowers will turn to ash.

Not all at once.

Quietly.

The way beautiful things disappear

when they are loved

in places never meant to hold them.

And perhaps that is the cruelest part

nothing here leaves dramatically.

It dies slowly.

Softly.

With enough tenderness

to make the ending almost resemble peace.

Deep down,

I have always known

this house could never become a home.

Because homes do not devour

the things brought into them trembling.

Homes do not ask beauty

to survive on smoke.

Homes make things grow.

So who do I blame

for the graveyard in my hands?

The fire

for burning?

Or myself

for arriving with armfuls of flowers

and calling the ashes love?

Because I knew.

God, I knew.

And still

I carried every fragile thing I had

across the threshold willingly.

Still,

I stayed long enough

to smell myself burning too.

Now the vase remains empty.

And somewhere behind me,

the fire is watching